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This chapter reviews ethical challenges confronting nonprofit administration in relation to organizational managerial practices and leadership behaviors. Through a theoretical model of nonprofit-specific toxic leadership, it reviews the dynamics of destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments in cases of unethical and corrupt nonprofit organizational behaviors. It provides a case for prioritizing oversight responsibilities of the board of directors, board supervision, promoting ethical culture in organizational leadership, and implementing policies for addressing destructive and corrupt nonprofit leaders. It reflects on how nonprofit toxic leadership primarily erodes public trust in the nonprofit sector and concludes with practical recommendations for recentering positive behaviors congruent with the nonprofit's social and public good mission.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how corporate and nonprofit leaders partner on public relations for corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs.

Through semi-structured interviews across the USA, and stretching into Europe and South America, leaders (n=24) from US-based corporations top-ranked for corporate citizenship, and the nonprofit organizations with which they have developed CSR programs, shared insights and best practices.

Corporate and nonprofit leaders who collaborate on CSR programs spoke independently about several essential shared values, including community-focused collaboration, fiscal responsibility, and strategic alignment. How they described their CSR partnerships reflects a mutual commitment to a distributed leadership model, which involves the need to span organizational boundaries, share unique expertise across levels and roles, and sustain long-term relationships. Consistent with prior research, this study also suggests that communication leaders in both corporations and nonprofit organizations leverage transactional (process-focused) and transformational (people-focused) leadership styles, as they work to build and foster these long-term partnerships.

The findings pinpoint how principles of the distributed leadership model come to life across CSR partnerships and contribute to the success of such partnerships. Corporations and their nonprofit partners must mutually focus on spanning, sharing, and sustaining as they build programs together. These shared principles exemplify a distributed leadership model and help define what CSR partnership truly means.

This study looks at CSR programs beyond just the perspective of the corporation and the public, taking into account the critical role the nonprofit organization plays as a partner in some CSR programming, and within a distributed leadership model.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how chief executives of 20 nonprofit organizations construe and prioritize the skills they use to perform typical leadership tasks.

The in-depth interview protocol used in the study is based on the Repertory Grid Technique, which elicits assumptions, beliefs, and values of respondents without imposing the researchers’ implicit frame of reference.

The interviews generated 285 skill constructs. Respondents in this study report that they utilize a mix of technical, interpersonal, and conceptual skills. Interpersonal skills, especially communication and trust building, appear to be particularly prevalent among the many skills used by executives to perform their leadership tasks.

Because this is an exploratory study, its findings cannot yet be generalized to other contexts. Therefore, the paper concludes with some propositions for further research.

The study may have implications for the design of curricula to prepare people to assume leadership positions in nonprofit organizations.

This study uses a distinctive methodology to elicit from nonprofit leaders their assumptions and beliefs about the skills they use to perform leadership tasks. In this respect, the findings are grounded in the frames of reference of the subjects, not those of the researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the notion of strategic leadership, that which has been primarily applied to for profit organizations, to nonprofits, specifically the church setting.

The research employs a case study methodology and draws primarily upon qualitative data collected from interviews and observation.

The findings reveal that over the past several years, the organization and its members have undergone a number of incremental and more radical changes. Much of this change has been attributed to the vision and leadership style of the current leader. Four key themes illuminate the processes and content of change under this strategic leader, including unsettlingly the status quo, model of shared leadership, shared vision and culture of community and learning.

The findings are based upon one case study site and this limits the generalizability of the research. In addition, exposure to the organization was limited to short periods of time on-site and the sample size was relatively small.

Achieving success in nonprofits requires leaders to have an intimate understanding of the complex nature of stakeholder relations and measuring success needs to be multi-dimensional in nature and linked directly to the mission and context of the organization, rather than based solely on generic measures.

There is limited research to date that examines the applicability of leadership theories that have been traditionally applied to for profit and public sector organizations to nonprofits. The research extends the notion of strategic leadership from the for profit setting to nonprofit organizations generally, and more specifically to the church setting.

The purpose of this study is to explore the intersection between managers' learning strategies and their organizational leadership practices in a nonprofit context.

Survey methodology was utilized including items from the multi‐factor leadership questionnaire and the learning tactics inventory. The survey was administered to a sample of nonprofit professional at various managerial levels.

Findings illustrate that effective learning from experience is significantly predictive of transformational leadership. Further analysis reveals that frequent use of thinking and action learning strategies have positive and significant relationship to transformational leadership in nonprofit managers.

Numerous authors have discussed the connections between effective learning and transformational leadership, but there has been insufficient empirical research to investigate the nature of this relationship. Brown and Posner's preliminary research found a strong correlation between learning and leadership but did not specifically examine transformational leadership. This study extends the literature by empirically testing each of four learning strategies and their relationship to transformational leadership. This extension is applied in a nonprofit context, which supports the transfer of for‐profit human resource management tools to the nonprofit environment. Limitations include a convenience sampling method. The study also provides human resource managers with career development tools in order to assess managers' learning styles then foster the learning styles that positively impact transformational leadership behaviors.

This study makes an important contribution to the empirical link between transformational leadership and learning.

By introducing business people to the frustrations of leadership roles in nonprofits and showing how executives with corporate experience have dealt with these challenges, the authors provide a guide for volunteers who serve as board members, executives, donors, consultants or partners in the nonprofit sector.

McKinsey & Company consultants interviewed executives who have served as both corporate and nonprofit leaders.

Corporate executives working with nonprofits need to take the time to get to know the organization and all its stakeholders before proposing any new practices or initiatives. They should avoid unilateral decisions – instead involving board, staff and key stakeholders as appropriate.

The sample interviewed was small, about a dozen top executives. However, as more corporate executive take leadership positions in nonprofits, there will be an opportunity to survey a much larger sample.

Business leaders serving as nonprofit board members will better understand their nonprofit roles. Donors will learn to use their financial clout to improve nonprofit performance. Cross‐sector partnerships – which are central to addressing society's most intractable problems – can anticipate and solve roadblocks caused by the nonprofit sector's different culture and demands. Top business executives will gain a better understanding of what makes the nonprofit world tick.

This article assesses the factors for nonprofit sector leadership success based on the first‐hand experience of top executives who have run major corporations.

This study was conducted to explore the motives and experiences of founders of community based nonprofit organizations. The information collected in this study will be useful to extension leadership educators as they work with the leaders in developing and sustaining these organizations that address needs unmet by government or other organizations. The results show these founders have strong motivation influenced by early experiences. They were confident and were able to handle both obstacles and opportunities. They clearly perceived themselves as leaders. The findings of this study will be used to develop a more comprehensive profile of community leaders that start community based nonprofit organizations. Extension leadership educators have an opportunity and a challenge to work with these emerging leaders.

Recent literature on nonprofit boards of directors has extensively investigated the composition, role, responsibilities, and characteristics of boards. Given the growing number of studies on nonprofit boards, which added new impulse to the debate on the role and characteristics of these players, it is time to analyze the state of the art and systematize the current knowledge. On the other hand, despite the presence of some literature reviews, a research comparing the debate among the nonprofit, private, and public sectors is still lacking. Using Gabrielsson and Huse’s (2004) framework, we wanted to identify factors that can influence research on nonprofit boards and compare our results with existing studies on private and public sector.

We conduct a systematic literature review, selecting empirical articles published in international scientific journals from 1992 to 2012.

We found similarities and differences in relation to research on boards among sectors. As a common result, we found that evolutionary studies still remains a neglected area in all of three realms. Finally, whereas input–output studies prevail in the private sector and contingency studies prevail in the public sector, behavioral studies prevail in the nonprofit sector, demonstrating, also, that the sector itself can make a difference in the board’s research.

This literature review provides some suggestion for further research on boards for all of three sectors. For example, we suggest complementing research on boards on all three sectors, especially in relation to evolutionary studies.

This paper fills the need to clarify the status of research on nonprofit boards, in order to address scholars in the understanding of the phenomenon.

Presents findings of a recent survey conducted on small to mid‐sized nonprofit organizations about the types of leadership development initiatives they offer employees.

Survey and interview methods used to collect data from nonprofit executive directors who participated in this study.

Most survey participants do not have the financial and other organizational capacities to offer leadership development initiatives to employees. In‐service workshops are the most frequent type of initiative and unfortunately often this learning initiative has a low impact given its limited short‐term exposure to participants. Other leadership development initiatives may be more beneficial to employees in terms of their long‐term impact.

Provides recommendations for small to mid‐sized nonprofit executive directors about ways to fund leadership development initiatives.

Offers nonprofit executive directors with suggestions about not investing in leadership development initiatives.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships of public service motivation (PSM) with leadership style (transformational and transactional) in two different sectors: nonprofit and public research.

The authors have investigated the effects of leadership styles on the level of PSM, assuming that transformational leadership has a positive and higher relation to PSM than transactional one. The analysis is based on data collected in two different investigations: a group of nonprofit volunteers, sitting in the NPs boards of directors, and a group of employees working for a National Research Institute.

Transformational leaders in the nonprofit organisation have higher scores on PSM than transactional leaders. For the employees of the research institution a charismatic leadership is not necessary, and even demotivating; autonomy is a central factor for researcher, and the intervention of the leader seems to be playing a motivation role only in moments of impasse.

Some more work should be done in refining the measures used in the scales. The perception of the leader attitude as controlling or supportive can be the key to better understand some controversial results: this can be object of further studies.

The results offers some preliminary results indicating that, in research institutions, a charismatic leadership should not be considered a generalised management solution. The transformational style reach better results in those research contexts in which research programmes are carried out via team work.

Not so much work in this field has been done yet in Italy, even less focusing on leadership in the research institutions.